The theory of architecture implicit in our world today, Christopher Alexander believes, is bankrupt. More and more people are aware that something is deeply wrong. Yet the power of present-day ideas is so great that many feel uncomfortable, even afraid, to say openly that they dislike what is happening, because they are afraid to seem foolish, afraid perhaps that they will be laughed at. Now, at last, there is a coherent theory which describes in modern terms an architecture as ancient as human society itself. The Timeless Way of Building is the introductory volume in the...
The theory of architecture implicit in our world today, Christopher Alexander believes, is bankrupt. More and more people are aware that something is ...
The Silk Road conjures up images of the exotic and the unknown, but whereas most travellers simply pass along it Chris Alexander chose to live there. 'A Carpet Ride to Khiva' is his personal account of life in an immensely alluring walled city in a remote desert oasis in Uzbekistan.
The Silk Road conjures up images of the exotic and the unknown, but whereas most travellers simply pass along it Chris Alexander chose to live there. ...
You can use this book to design a house for yourself with your family; you can use it to work with your neighbors to improve your town and neighborhood; you can use it to design an office, or a workshop, or a public building. And you can use it to guide you in the actual process of construction. After a ten-year silence, Christopher Alexander and his colleagues at the Center for Environmental Structure are now publishing a major statement in the form of three books which will, in their words, "lay the basis for an entirely new approach to architecture, building and planning, which will we...
You can use this book to design a house for yourself with your family; you can use it to work with your neighbors to improve your town and neighborhoo...
"These notes are about the process of design: the process of inventing things which display new physical order, organization, form, in response to function." This book, opening with these words, presents an entirely new theory of the process of design.
In the first part of the book, Mr. Alexander discusses the process by which a form is adapted to the context of human needs and demands that has called it into being. He shows that such an adaptive process will be successful only if it proceeds piecemeal instead of all at once. It is for this reason that forms from traditional...
"These notes are about the process of design: the process of inventing things which display new physical order, organization, form, in response to ...
In book three of this four-volume work, Alexander presents hundreds of his own buildings and those of other contemporaries who have used methods consistent with the theory of living process Nearly seven hundred pages of projects, built and planned in many countries over a thirty-year period, illustrate the impact of living process on the world. The book provides the reader with an intuitive feel for the kind of world, its style and geometry, which is needed to generate living structure in the world and its communities, together with its ecological and natural character. The projects include...
In book three of this four-volume work, Alexander presents hundreds of his own buildings and those of other contemporaries who have used methods consi...
Book four presents a new cosmology that arises from the careful study of architecture and art, and above all from the practice of the arts. It is a cosmology which places the I, our experience of self, as the linking stem that unites each individual with the whole, connecting consciousness and matter
Book four presents a new cosmology that arises from the careful study of architecture and art, and above all from the practice of the arts. It is a co...